Verification is the process of assessing the quality of a weather forecast. The forecast is compared to observations or an estimate of what actually occured. Verification can be qualitative or quantitative. In the capacity building projects we have so far focused on quantitative verification of location forecasts/point forecast using observations from ground stations, but future work may include spatial verification and use of remote measurements from satellite and radar if available.
The verification tool harp is introduced in several capacity building projects. The figures below shows examples of verification results achieved by using harp, where two different numerical weather prediction models are compared: (ECMWF and WRF).
In the first example we see the mean bias for maximum temperature for individual stations in Bangladesh for a period over 3 months. Red indicates warm bias, and blue indicates cold bias. Stronger color indicates stronger bias. In the second example we see the mean bias with respect to lead time for daily precipitation for 43 stations in Bangladesh.
